ORC Spring 2023 Week 3 & 4!

ORC Week 3 & 4

Buffalo Check Baby!

It’s week 3 of the #OneRoomChallenge and we are finally getting to the best part, the BUFFALO CHECK! If you’re not familiar, the plan for this baby boy nursery makeover stemmed from the buffalo check plaid paint treatment I found on Jaime Castiglio’s blog. Check it out, the whole makeover is beautiful. As soon as I saw that image, I stopped my scroll and pinned. Beautiful inspo pictures and detailed instructions, I was sold! This was the look I wanted for my baby boy’s nursery.

Fast forward to over a year later, and we are finally in our house and I have a blank canvas to work with to create this look and bring our own special vibe to it. Week 3 and what is turning into week 4 is all about painting.

Once we finished the board and batten, we sealed every seam and joint with paintable latex caulk, recessed the nail holes, spackled over any spots, and sanded everything to smooth it down. It doesn’t matter how fancy schmancy your paint is, if your sanding job is crappy or non-existent, then it’s going to show. There is a great reel about this from the @paintedbykaylapayne about this.

After sanding, the key to any good job is priming, especially when dealing with new skim coating, unprimed wood, and mdf. If not, your paint is not going to stick well to these surfaces. I was eager to play with my new paint sprayer so this was the perfect time to get into our tyvek bunny suits, put on our mask, and spray EVERYTHING!

If you haven’t used a sprayer before, then you’re probably not familiar with overspray. This is the fine particulate of spray paint that is left floating in the air that gets everywhere! This is why covering up every service is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, you’ll be finding bits of paint on every surface, including yourself. For this same reason, you need to wear protective gear for your eyes, nose, and mouth. A N95 mask is sufficient or you can get a respirator mask from any hardware store. I recommend goggles of some sort. If you’re wearing a bunny suit, you’ll be sweating and hot, which means your glasses will be fogging. Do yourself a favor and pick up some no fog safety glasses to make your life easier.

Once we were appropriately donned up with our gear, we were ready to start spraying. After we sprayed an even coat of primer everywhere, it was time to break down the plan for the rest of the paint. We had three major areas of base paint all with different sheens. We started by spraying all of the board and batten with semi-gloss polar bear white by Behr. We did two coats of the semi-gloss to get really good coverage on the trim. Since this will be the ‘high traffic’ region of the walls, we wanted a really good application of the paint.

From there, we cleaned out the paint sprayer and switched to flat (insert name of sky blue) blue on the ceiling. For the ceiling we did a single coat and didn’t worry about creating an even covering. Our plan for this is to paint it with clouds, so having slight variations in the color and coverage helps to create an ethereal cloud look.

Finally, we hand rolled the top third of the wall with polar bear white in eggshell. This allowed us to cover any overspray from the board and batten as well as the ceiling. We opted for the eggshell to create some depth in the texture compared to the semi-gloss of the trim work.

Once we had our base coats down we were ready to start the….BUFFALO CHECK!!

Before this process even started, I sent Jake to pick out colors for the check. I tried so many times, but every sample I tried just wasn’t the right fit. Finally, I showed him the inspo picture, the general tones I was wanting, and sent him out to conquer the paint show at Home Depot. He purchased the perfect set of colors.

In the original blog, Jaime used a navy base color and then that color 25% lighter, and yet another lighter version for her pattern. When I tried that with my original color, it didn’t really work…the mixed sample seemed exactly the same. Instead of trying it that way, Jake found the base color that I liked, and found the family card that has three or more colors with the same tones and brought those home. They were perfect!! A rich royal blue, slightly lighter, almost periwinkle blue, and a blue in between. All three of those complimented the ceiling blue as well. I was in love with the color combo coming together in this room!

Now that we had our colors picked out, it was time to get the pattern on the wall. There were a couple of ways to go about putting the check pattern on the wall. First, we had to figure out how far down to come from the ceiling to mark our top line. This meant figuring out how big our crown piece was going to be and how far down from the ceiling it needed to be to fit the hidden rope light. Once we had that measurement, we decided to use a chalk line to mark our horizontal lines around the room starting from the top of the grid (which is the bottom border of the crown we had yet to install). Once we had our top chalk line we needed to decide the size of the squares, 4” or 5”? For the size of the room, we went with 5” squares.

The height we were covering was divisible by 5 which gave us an even number of squares to work with, but I knew I wanted it to look like there was a partial square on top and bottom. I just like the way it looked this way, but it also helped with any variations in floor and ceiling height to not look too obvious. From the top, we measured our next horizontal line down by 2.5”. From there, the next horizontal line was 5”. We repeated this until we did the last line, which then left us with a 2.5” bottom border just above the cap rail.

Now it was time to mark the vertical strips with the chalk line. Jake quickly figured out that a push pin into the wall and letting gravity and the chalk line do the rest of the work, made things pretty easy. He started in the main focal corner of the room (opposite the entrance door) and marked vertical lines every 5” to make the squares. He carried the squares through the corners, meaning he didn’t make the edges stop in the corner, but measured the corner as part of the box. In the end, this created an even number of equally spaced boxes all around the room.

The reason we used chalk is because it is fast, easy, and quick to remove. If we made a mistake, a quick baby wipe would get rid of it. Also, it could stay up there for days without issue. Tape can leave a residue and start to fall off the wall. Plus, I didn’t want to have to tape, then remove it after painting, and then re-tape over and over and over again.That’s a lot of tape to waste.

Once everything was chalked, it was time to get painting. I started with the horizontal lines. I recommend getting an angled detail brush to make this easy. I personally used Zibra’s trim brush and found it was amazing for getting clean lines and holding paint really well. In fact, I recommend you pick up their best-of kit. The quality is definitely worth it!

It took a couple of days to paint all of the horizontals around the room. The nursery is 11’ x 23’ to give you an idea of the area we’re covering. I finished the focal wall and wanted to see what it looked like with the full effect, so I switched to the next darker shade of blue and started filling in the vertical lines. Since the overlapping box will have a darker color, this meant I didn’t have to paint in that box and could let some of my painting spill over into the overlap area (aka be messy in my painting)…basically, this was faster.

Once a few of the vertical and horizontal stripes were dry, Jake put on tape around the overlap box where the deepest blue would be painted. I also did a couple free hand for comparison. Once the deep blue boxes were painted, I removed the tape for comparison. Personally, I liked the taped center box a little more, but they both looked really good. Once I could see the full effect of these colors playing together, I was so excited to see the finished product.

We moved around the room in sections, me focusing on painting the horizontals, while Jake finished chalking the rest of the room. Once he was finished, he joined me on the scaffolding to finish the horizontals. Over the next few days we would take turns painting and filling in the vertical lines. When we had enough done, Jake started taping and taping…and taping all of the center boxes. For a space that size, there were A LOT! See our highlights on IG for the exact number ;).

With the vertical stripes finally finished, I started working on the blue boxes. This was pretty fast, but took about two to three days to finish. When we finally finished the last few boxes in our entry nook, it was such a relief to be done and so exciting to see it all come together!

A few things we recommend along the way:

1. A good chalk line to apply your grid.

2. Baby wipes. These were a huge help with fixing mistakes with the caulk, chalk, and paint. I don’t know how I ever did DIY projects without these magical things!

3. Pull the tape while the paint is wet to keep the lines super clean and be able to clean up any bleed through while it’s wet.

4. Don’t stress small paint oopsies. You won’t be able to see these from far away. We often would spend time focusing on small blips and then realize you can’t see or find them once you stepped away.

5. Use a scaffold. We invested in these at the beginning of this project and they saved the day on so many occasions for this project. Being able to get sections done at a time was so much faster and ergonomically more comfortable on the scaffolding compared to a ladder.

6. Wash your brushes! We’re experienced DIYers and take care of our tools, but sometimes we’d forget to wash the brushes right away and come back to dry paint on the bristles after a break. It was worth it to make sure they constantly stayed wet in paint or were washed as soon as we were finished to keep them in optimal painting readiness.

7. Have fun! There was a lot that went into getting this to look right and sometimes felt like it was never ending, but we’d take a step back and appreciate what we had accomplished and how fun it was to transform this space for our littlest. Plus, it was so fun to involve our toddler with the painting, chalk line, and giving his input on colors.

We hope you got some good ideas and inspiration from our experience. If you try out this technique, tag us (@lueckyhome) in your photos on Instagram!

Up next is the ceiling treatment we prepped for earlier in the painting section of the project. Stay tuned for the detailed blog post on this!

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